


Gyre

by azarias



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Antisemitism, Cannibalism, Content Warning: Medieval Catholicism, Crusades, Gen, Islamophobia, Trans Male Character, Trans!Nicky, knife trans not sweater trans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:22:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25729630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias
Summary: Nicolò takes the cross.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 51





	Gyre

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to merle_p and Rahne for betaing.

Nicolò hears the voice of God again, for the first time since his girlhood, on the steps of San Siro when the bishops of Grenoble and Orange come to Genoa to preach crusade. They preach in the plain language of the people, not the high Latin of learned churchmen, and the assembled congregation _boils_. 

The Jew and the Saracen, the heretic and the unbeliever, what they have _done_ to Christ. To Christ's body in the church, to Christ's grave in the Holy City, to all the people of God. Blasphemy and worse than blasphemy, the Cross itself desecrated, the Lord's own blood crying out for vengeance. Around Nicolò the world goes bright, blinding bright, and the sounds of ringing bells and hissing snakes fill his ears and it's in his _heart_ that he hears.

**_I made you for this. Take up this Cross and follow Me._ **

And Nicolò falls to the ground, blind and weeping, because it has been so long, long and long since he turned his face from God and followed the world instead. The easy path. Weakness. _You have the body of a woman, a weak and feeble vessel. You are meant for home and children. Put aside childish things and do as you were made for._ God had not told him that, but he had listened all the same and called the voice of God a liar. Wretched and damned and he deserves damnation, _he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit has never forgiveness, but his sin is eternal_ , but Nicolò can hear the voice of God again and knows that even now there is mercy. He looks up and all he sees is brightness and the Cross.

He staggers to his feet and surges forward with the crowd, straining to kiss the Cross and swear himself to the fight, but his husband's hand on his wrist holds him back. Against the tide of the faithful and the call of God, Matteo holds him back as Matteo has held him back since the day they wed, and Nicolò turns to strike him, but Matteo catches his other wrist in his big rough hands and shakes Nicolò until his teeth ache. "What are you doing?" his husband grinds through gritted teeth. "Woman, have you gone mad? Our _children_." The children are crowded up against Nicolò, clinging to his skirts because they're more afraid of being trampled by the crowd than of their father's wrath and mother's passion.

Two of them, a boy of three and a girl of seven, not all that Nicolò has born but all that have lived. He looks down at them from a great height, from outside his body, and feels nothing but revulsion. Fleshy and snot-faced, tears in their eyes, they are living testament to the depraved things he has done. He has eaten of a fruit that was forbidden to him and twisted his soul and these are the poisonous seeds he has dropped in his dung. Sin passes from mother to child in conception and he has made these dirty things in his own corrupt image.

Nauseated, he tears himself away. Matteo lets him go because Nicolò keeps his back to the cross and walks away from the church, out into the city and toward home. This is the path he has always walked, but now his steps are light, light. For the first time in so many years he is not walking in sin.

Later that night, when the children have settled into bed, Matteo speaks to him sweetly and offers love-making in apology for bruising his wrists. Matteo kisses him and fondles his breasts, and calls him _wife_ and calls him also by that hateful name that has never belonged to Nicolò. It has only ever _attached_ to him, a parasite. It's the name of some woman Nicolò has never been. It's name of his cunt, the name of the pain he screamed through in five childbirths, the lie he told himself when he chose sin over God. While Matteo grunts out his pleasure in Nicolò's lax and silent body, it's that name that lets Nicolò go away, outside himself. He isn't here. That woman is. This is none of his concern. Her husband and her children — let her tend to them. Let her husband fuck her and fall into deep and sated sleep.

_Any man who hates not his father and his mother, his brothers and his sisters, his wife and his children and even his own life, he cannot take up the Cross and follow Me._

He leaves in the quiet hours, with yesterday's bread and coins stolen from his husband's wages. He can't set sail from Genoa. Genoa is a large city but _large_ is only a few thousand people and too many people will know him, will know Matteo the blacksmith's wife and call him by her name. He cannot become _crusignatus_ here because his husband has forbidden it and they will see the red linen cross over his breast and they will stop him. He will walk to Rome if he must. He will cross the swamps to Rimini. He will go a beggar to Venice and swear himself to any lord there who will take him as a soldier and put him on a ship to the Holy Land. Outside of Genoa, he knows very little of the shape of the world, but divine will is guiding him, and he will find his way.

His first night on the road he cuts his hair and binds his breasts, and spends the next three days unbinding and rebinding them until they lie flat beneath his clothing while he can still breathe and labor. It hurts, but it hurts less than when his children had gummed the tender skin and sucked milk from his swollen teats, and it hurts to better purpose. These are the pains of a soldier. On the road to Jerusalem there will be no dearth of suffering, and every agony is another sin remitted.

Unlooked for, he finds brotherhood on the road. There are many pilgrims, not just him, searching for a ship that will take them to the war. They learn his name is Nicolò and welcome him to their company, trade him weapons for less coin than anyone else would take. He has been a blacksmith's wife and can swing a hammer as well as any other man. A spear is not much to learn.

When he bleeds, he must hide it from his new brothers, but once he has disposed of the evidence he goes to his knees in thanksgiving. If he had fallen pregnant again, if that last night of submission to the world had cost him this — but it _had not_. For once in his wretched life he is carrying out God's will, and God has made him clean.

Before a man may take the Cross, the priest asks, _Are you a free man?_ Yes. _Have you a wife?_ No. Nothing binds Nicolò to this place.

In Anatolia, there is so much more blood. Nicolò spills it, and his is spilt. He takes a wound in his arm at Dorylaeum and must rest for a month before he can fight again. Beside the fire he sits and tells stories with his brothers, all of them exalting their own prowess and laughing at each other's lies. His arm grows strong again and stronger, and he fights like he has had a spear in his hands all his life. He fights on the road; he fights at Antioch. When the city falls he looks past the plunder and the corpses stacked inside churches where they had fled for safety and he sees glory. If they have taken this city, they can take Jerusalem. What blood they spill before then means so little beside a prize so precious. He tells himself this, and in his heart he still feels God calling him onward, reshaping his soft and feeble body for war. All around him are soldiers who hear the same call. Some are even like him, born eunuchs like him, and in the rough camp of a marching army he feels himself at home for the first time in his life.

He fights on.

At Ma'arra ...

At Ma'arra, they are none of them men. They are animals, starving in the ruins they've made. They are beasts and all around them is a feast of dead flesh they cannot resist. They eat the bodies of the Saracens before relief comes. Mayhap they eat their brothers.

Nicolò takes corruption into himself again and prays to be made clean. Food comes and his strength returns. He fights on.

He sees and he does so many obscene things, but the voice that speaks within him is still the voice of God. Sacrifice cleanses sin. To die on this pilgrimage is to be absolved of _everything_ , innocent as the Virgin. That's worth a little pain.

Outside of Jerusalem he kills a poet. He dies covered in the blood of a gentle man. 

And when his soul ascends to Paradise he finds the gates are barred against him.

**Author's Note:**

> Historical notes:
> 
> The first paragraph is probably a lie. Those two bishops did preach in Genoa to drum up support for the war, but they almost certainly did so in Latin, not vernacular Ligurian, and they probably spoke to local elites and clergy, not the hoi polloi. No one was calling it a crusade yet, either, but eh.
> 
> Canon!Nicky certainly took a ship from Genoa to the Levant, because there's no reason he wouldn't have, and probably didn't fight at Dorylaeum, because there's no reason he would have. Since this fic's version of Nicky necessarily had to take a different way to the war, I took the liberty of plunking him down wherever it was convenient for the narrative.
> 
> The descriptions of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic crusader propaganda and of the cannibalism at Ma'arra are, unfortunately, drawn directly from history.
> 
> Edit: I messed up Italian geography and I'm not gonna fix it.


End file.
